Canyon Sacrifice (10 page)

Robert nodded. It appeared he'd received the same report from Donald. “Just that and curiosity, then?”

“You mean, why I was there?”

Rather than answer, Robert waited. He was good at that, his Navajo side coming to the fore. Taking advantage of the pause, Chuck determined his course.

The woman from Albuquerque had recognized him last night. It made sense, given the chief ranger's unannounced appearance, that she'd told Robert as much. Chuck's leveling with Robert about his having been at Maricopa Point would simply confirm what the chief ranger already knew. Plus, there was the outside chance Chuck's coming clean might somehow help in tracking down Carmelita. But Chuck wasn't ready to tell Robert about his involvement, however tangential, in the death of the woman's boyfriend.

“Curiosity,” Chuck repeated with a nod. Then he zigged.
“There was quite a crowd. I couldn't see what was going on. What if you'd found the A. Dinaveri?”

T
EN

9:30 a.m.

“The A. Dinaveri?” Robert scoffed. “You've gotta be kidding.”

Chuck mustered all the false enthusiasm he could. “You know the calendar, the dates. A lot of people think this could be the year.” He turned to Janelle. “The A. Dinaveri is a necklace thought by the one-and-only Arturo Dinaveri to have been left by the Anasazi Indians in a secret shrine somewhere along the South Rim a thousand years ago, about the time the Anasazi disappeared from the Colorado Plateau. Dinaveri was a famous Italian archaeologist who worked at Chaco Canyon in the 1950s. You know where that's at, north of Albuquerque, right?”

Janelle's tight nod made clear her frustration at the delay in getting on with finding Carmelita. When Clarence cleared his throat to speak, she wheeled on him, her eyes flashing.

“According to Dinaveri,” Clarence said, showing off his own archaeological know-how despite Janelle's obvious irritation, “the Anasazi hid a necklace in the shrine as an offering to Chirsáuha, the Anasazi god of fertility said to live under the river at the bottom of the canyon.”

Robert raised a skeptical eyebrow. “Dinaveri just wanted to make his time at Chaco look worthwhile.”

In Italian archaeological classification, the A. in A. Dinaveri stood for
articulo
, although everyone in the Southwest archaeological community, Chuck included, assumed that in Dinaveri's famously self-inflated mind the A. stood for Arturo as well. How Dinaveri had come up with the idea of a hidden shrine at the South Rim from his study of the Anasazi at a site far from the Grand Canyon had been subjected, over the decades, to much ridicule.

“It makes a great story though,” Clarence responded, avoiding
Janelle's acidic glare. “Myth says the Anasazi people first came to the Earth's surface from beneath the river.”

Chuck gave Janelle a look of understanding and brought the story to a close. “Dinaveri's team discovered a shadow calendar at Chaco, one that tells time by directing the sun's rays between lined-up slabs of sandstone. Dinaveri claimed the calendar indicated Chirsáuha was due to lead a reemergence of the Anasazi to the Earth's surface here at the Grand Canyon sometime about, well, now.”

“I can't believe you, of all people, believe Dinaveri's drivel,” Robert said.

Drivel was the right word for the Italian archaeologist's brash prediction. But at least all the talk of the A. Dinaveri had steered the chief ranger away from discussing Chuck's appearance at Maricopa Point. “Your nephew believes it,” Chuck said.

“Marvin?” Robert grunted. “That's his problem. Yours, too, I guess, long as you're still working for him.”

“Final report's due in a couple of weeks.”

“Still enough time to find the A. Dinaveri for him,” the chief ranger replied dryly.

“It's supposed to be hidden right here under your nose.”

“Doesn't exist. You know it and I know it.”

“Someday, Marvin'll know it, too. Meantime, I'll make sure to leave the possibility open in my final.”

“Spoken like someone who wants another contract to come his way.”

“Look, I'm sorry,” Janelle broke in, “but Rosie really needs some breakfast.”

“Yessireebob,” Rosie proclaimed from Janelle's side. “I'm hungry!”

“I apologize, miss,” Robert said to Rosie. He addressed Chuck with mock formality, “Mr. Bender.”

Chuck dipped his head in return. “Chief Ranger Begay.”

Robert walked to his Suburban. He turned to Chuck as he opened the door. “Girls,” he said, his tone measured.

“What's that?”

“You said
girls
, plural, on the shuttle with you and your wife yesterday.”

“Oh. Right.” Chuck had introduced only Rosie to Robert. “Carmelita,” Chuck said after a second's hesitation. “Carm. Rosie's sister.” He waved vaguely in the direction of the camper.

Robert waited, unmoving, next to his car. It was Rosie, finally, who broke the silence. “My sister is with her daddy,” she told Robert. She did a little dance, her arms above her head. “Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh.”

The chief ranger scanned the campsite from one side to the other until his eyes came to rest on the camper. “Well, okay then,” he said slowly. He looked at Janelle. “I hope you and your girls enjoy your visit.”

He tossed his hat on the passenger seat, climbed in, and drove away.

Chuck turned to Janelle and Clarence. They'd lost precious minutes dealing with Robert's visit; it was time they came up with a plan. “Should we have told Robert?” he asked. “Do we go to the police?”

The two shook their heads.

“The paper, the ‘NO COPS,'” Janelle said. “Miguel means it.” She took Rosie by the shoulders and pointed her in the direction of the picnic table. “He's used to getting what he wants.”

“He's not stupid either,” Clarence told Chuck. “Dude's never been busted. Not once. He's got a clean sheet, far as I know. Everybody around him has done time. But Miguel? Not so much as a parking ticket.”

“He always bragged about how hard he worked to keep things quiet,” said Janelle. “He was a master at staying in the background, getting other people to do the dirty work for him,
letting everyone else take the heat.”

“If he's so smart,” Chuck said, “why was he broke when he called you? Why is he reduced to coming all the way out here and kidnapping his own daughter for money?”

Janelle and Clarence exchanged looks. Clarence gave Janelle a small nod.

“I've never known a more jealous person,” she told Chuck. “He put a knife to a guy's throat once just for looking at me the wrong way. And he's vindictive, always saying he never forgets anyone who wrongs him, how it might take years, but he'll get them back.”

“You think he's coming after you?” Chuck asked. “After all this time?”

“No. He won't hurt me on account of the girls. It's all part of his messed up sense of
familia
, his Latino honor. I'm their
mamá
. He can't hurt me, and he won't hurt the girls, so . . .”

Chuck's eyes widened as he remembered what Janelle had said before Robert's arrival at the campsite: “
Tag. You're it
.”

“So I'm fair game,” Chuck finished for her.

“I'd bet everything I had on it,” Clarence interjected. “He knows all about you by now. Probably has the Bender Archaeological website memorized.”

“But why Carmelita? Why not just track me down, put a gun to my head, and be done with it?”

“Because that would be too easy?” Clarence pondered aloud. “No. There's more to it than that.” He looked at Chuck. “Miguel Gutierrez is mean. And I mean mean, as in e-
vil
. You have no idea how happy I was, my parents were, when he left. Every time I'm with the girls, I think how lucky they are to be rid of him. But I can't help having visions of him showing up again sometime. I know how bad he must want to hurt Jan, especially now that she's so happy.” He shuddered. “I agree you're fair game, but I think he just can't help going after Jan, too, sticking the knife
into her even while he convinces himself he's not.”

“You're getting pretty deep here, Clarence.”

“Yeah, but I'm certified, remember?”

Chuck smiled at what had been an ongoing joke between the two of them throughout the transmission-line contract. Clarence had teased Chuck mercilessly for getting an archaeology degree from tiny Fort Lewis College to do what Chuck did for a living: assess, dig, screen, report; assess, dig, screen, report; contract after contract, year after year. In contrast, Clarence claimed, his degree from Albuquerque's renowned University of New Mexico School of Anthropology in anthropological archaeology gave him license to do much more.

“I'm an archaeologist and an anthropologist,” he boasted. “I've got a brain and I'm certified to use it.” Which had led to Clarence's telling an imagined story about virtually every hunting point and potsherd he came across.

“Bag it and move on,” Chuck had admonished him each time. “We're doing a job here, not making a movie.”

But Clarence never could let go. “I wonder . . .” he would begin, holding up his latest discovery. “What if . . .” he would continue, outing himself as just the sort to believe in the A. Dinaveri—not because the idea of the necklace made any logical sense, but because the possibility made such a good story.

Chuck doused his smile as quickly as it had come. “Okay. We've got a crazed maniac who has kidnapped Carmelita to somehow get at me and Jan at the same time.” He faced Clarence. “So tell us, swami, what's he going to do next?”

“One: he'll take good care of Carm. She's having fun right now. I'm sure of it. I bet she doesn't even know she's been kidnapped. Two: this is going to come down to money, one way or another. Everything else aside, that's how Miguel measures himself. He's going to make you pay. First in cash. Then, but only then, and only maybe then, in blood.”

Chuck thought about the guy he'd punched, who'd fallen to his death off Maricopa Point. “Is Miguel a monster-SUV type? Big, showy, and bad-ass?”

Clarence took a moment, considering. “Could be by now, I suppose. But he was into sportier stuff before.” He turned to Janelle. “The Miata.
¿Recuerdas?
”

“Two seats,” Janelle explained to Chuck. “That's what he had, we had, when Carmelita was born. He refused to get anything else. If I wanted to go anywhere with her, I had to go by bus or borrow somebody else's car.”

Chuck dug the toe of his shoe into the ground. It didn't sound as if Miguel was the guy he'd tangled with on the promontory.

Rosie twisted back and forth beside the picnic table. “I said I'm hungry!”

Janelle went to her, and Chuck stepped away from the campsite.

Did Janelle and Clarence know that all national park rangers were trained and deputized as full-on law-enforcement officers? That they were, for all practical purposes, cops? Betting the answer was no, he pulled his cell phone from his pocket and scrolled to the number he wanted.

E
LEVEN

10 a.m.

Janelle sat at the picnic table, Rosie eating a banana beside her. Clarence sat across from them, gripping a cup of coffee so hard his knuckles were white. Chuck hovered at the head of the table. Miguel was about to call, Janelle and Clarence claimed, any minute now.

Chuck had suggested calling the girls' father rather than giving him the chance to initiate contact, but Janelle and Clarence nixed the idea, arguing that Miguel wouldn't answer anyway, that it was better to let him make the first move. Besides, Janelle had explained, Miguel changed phones so often she had no idea what number to call.

“We should let
Mami
and
Papi
know,” Janelle said to her brother.

Clarence drummed the side of his coffee cup with his fingers. “Agreed.”

Chuck frowned. “You'll scare them to death.”

Janelle picked up her smartphone in its jeweled case.

Enrique and Yolanda Ortega, the only babysitters the girls had ever known, lived for Carmelita and Rosie. That fact alone, Chuck supposed, gave them the right to know what was going on with their oldest granddaughter.

Janelle punched in the call home, spoke tersely in Spanish for a couple of minutes, then turned to Clarence when she ended the call. “You heard, didn't you? They're coming.”

“They're
what
?” Chuck broke in.

Janelle looked up at him from the picnic table. “They're coming here, to the canyon.” She placed her hands palm down on the table and pressed them so hard into the metal-mesh tabletop that her arms shook, as if that action would somehow
return Carmelita to her.

“When?” Chuck asked.

“Now. Right away.” She folded her hands away in her lap.

“What if Miguel's on his way to Albuquerque with Carm?” Chuck asked. “It'd be better to have your folks there.”